A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin has put together a new site, bxr.su. His announcement to users@ goes into a lot of detail, but here’s a preview: it’s an OpenGrok site that has a forked version of OpenGrok that’s both speedy and takes BSD into account, along with other nice features.
Here’s the catch: it’s currently IPv6 only. IPv4 will be on as a test just today, and on for good shortly after. Read that announcement I mentioned for details.
John Marino has posted about the state of dports: over 19500 ports built, build logs available, and patches to add even more can be sent through github. XFCE4, KDE3, and KDE4 are building, though he could use some help with GNOME2.
Man, I’m stretching it to make that “Over nine thousand!” joke, now.
If you have a DragonFly 3.2 system and you want to try the 3.4 release candidate, you can delete your local source, edit the Makefile to pull down 3.4 instead of 3.2, and run it.
cd /usr
rm -rf src
vi /usr/Makefile;
(in vi) :%s/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_2/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4/g
(save, quit vi)
make src-create-shallow
… then proceed to make buildworld and so on, as normal.
The caveats: I haven’t tested this yet, and this assumes you don’t have any local changes in /usr/src that you want to save. The usual warnings about lighting your computer on fire, etc., apply.
The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.
If you have a mfi(4) device – in other words, a LSI MegaRAID SAS driver – you can now see/import/clear/etc. foreign configurations, thanks to this commit from Sascha Wildner, tested by Francois Tigeot, and originally from FreeBSD.
For the confused, ‘foreign’ means any disk hooked to a RAID controller that isn’t part of a configuration the RAID device already knows about. A replacement disk, or more worryingly, a good disk gone bad/unrecognizable. (I’ve had both.)
If you have an ath(4), wpi(4) or iwi(4) wireless network link, and you’re running DragonFly-master, please update. Sepherosa Ziehau has pushed Johannes Hoffman’s wlan_serialize branch, which means bringing up wlan0 is a bit easier – and less crashy.
It needs to be tested for wpi(4) and iwi(4), however, so if you have success or failure with those devices, please say so in reply.
(new post category starting now: “Please test”)
DragonFly 3.4 is branched – as a release candidate, with the current target for 3.4.0 release as the weekend of April 13-14. See the tagging commit note for a list of all the commit messages.
Note that in previous releases, we tagged “x.y.0” on branch, and “x.y.1” on release. I’m now tagging “x.y.0rc” for the release candidate at branch time, and we’ll tag with a more normal (to my ears) “x.y.0” for the release.
If you build a 3.4.0rc image right now, you’ll get an older quarterly release of pkgsrc. That’ll be changed tomorrow as the DragonFly pkgsrc git source is updated and I change where 3.4’s /usr/Makefile points.
The 2013Q1 branch of pkgsrc has been announced. Along with the normal quarterly material, there’s several notes: preliminary Cygwin support is present, ruby 1.8 will be retired in favor of 1.9 after this release, and the pkgsrc.org web page now has a very nice new look and logo.
I plan to branch DragonFly 3.4 very soon, and that version will have 2013Q1 as default.
Update: The 2013Q1 branch should be available by tomorrow on DragonFly’s git; the repository needs to update and convert from NetBSD’s CVS and that takes a little time. I’ll post when it’s ready.
I saw this Hacker News post and figured I should emphasize: pkgsrc is still going to be available in the 3.4 release of DragonFly; we’re not suddenly switching to dports. I don’t want anyone to think they’re going to have to rip out all their packages and go to a new, untried system, all at once.
If you were thinking, “Hey, I’d like to try an early version of DragonFly 3.4 before it’s released”, I’ll just point you at the recent daily snapshots of 3.3. These are close enough to a release candidate, I think.
The next release of DragonFly will be 3.4, and it’s probably going to be mid-April.
OpenGrok is a source browser that I have not used extensively, but many people say is a great tool. The same people say it’s difficult to run. Zafer Aydogan just posted that DragonFly’s source is available now from his perfectly-functional OpenGrok installation.
(I’ll put it in the links sidebar here, too.)
NetBSD is using/will be using? ‘npf’, a new version of pf similarly-named-but completely-different firewall from pf. Hubert Feyrer put together a bunch of links talking about it. I link this because DragonFly is using a version of pf equivalent to what OpenBSD 4.8, and there’s been some discussion of what to do next; it appears FreeBSD and NetBSD are forking off separately from OpenBSD’s version.
Update: npf and pf share 2 letters in the name and nothing else, as Joerg told me – corrected.
Hey, look, DragonFly BSD showing in tweetspam! Don’t bother following the tweeted links; they don’t have anything useful. It’s entertaining to see the structure and coding of these bots; they’re no horse_ebooks, of course.
There’s an as-yet-undiagnosed problem with the @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists; you won’t see any mail from them right now. I don’t have an ETA for a fix because I don’t know the underlying cause yet…
Update: Fixed; I think – dragonflybsd.org DNS server was not responding, and it had a ripple effect.
I’ve put in an application for DragonFly to be a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the 6th year in a row – we have mentors lined up, so we’ll know by the Friday after next. See my post on kernel@ for pretty much what I just said.
Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD. I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point. Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old. The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.
Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use? I don’t know the answer.
It seems Sepherosa Ziehau won’t rest until he’s reached peak performance for every network card in DragonFly; he’s added multiple ring/MSI-X support for Broadcom 5709/5716 chipsets in DragonFly. In more concrete terms, this means better speeds when transmitting and receiving multiple streams of data.
(at least, I think so.)
I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently DragonFly’s version of patch(1) comes from OpenBSD and NetBSD. FreeBSD’s old version of patch is being replaced by this and modified to match the old one’s behaviors. It would be worthwhile to bring these changes back, if possible, just to reduce the differences in a utility that’s already been around the world, so to speak.
As an aside, I always thought patch was one of Larry Wall’s unsung successes, and I’m entertained by any program that has “Hmm…” as one of its official outputs.